Jfv Revised 2

1 “Almost Psychopathic”: British Working Class Realism and the Horror Film in the late 1950s and early 1960s Mark Jancovich Room at the Top (1959) was released in the UK only two years after Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein (1957). The former was the first film in a “‘new wave’ of working class realism” (Hill, Sex 2), which is often seen as one of the major aesthetic achievements of British cinema, while the latter enjoyed phenomenal commercial success and established a new British horror cinema. Given the virtual coincidence between these two cinematic events, it seems strange that these events are rarely discussed in relationship to one another in histories of British cinema. For example, John Hill’s Sex, Class and Realism makes only two references to Hammer or horror more generally, while neither David Pirie’s A Heritage of Horror, nor Chibnell and Petley’s British Horror Cinema, engage with this relationship, even though the latter features an article on The Innocents (1961), a horror film that was directed by Jack Clayton immediately after Room at the Top. Much the same is also true of Rigby’s account of the British horror film, which makes repeated references to isolated moments of interconnection but does not bring these together in a larger argument. Murphy’s Sixties British Cinema is even structured as if to isolate these events from one another so that working class realism is contained within chapter one, the popular horror films of Hammer and others are dealt with in chapter eight, while chapter four is given over to “the possibility of constructing a tradition of ‘art cinema’ from among British films” (5), an discussion that includes many of the films that could be demonstrate overt crossover or traffic between realism and horror, films that include The Innocents, The Servant (1963), Night Must Fall (1964) and Repulsion (1965). 1 2 Consequently, the absence of any detailed consideration of the relationship between working class realism and horror is due to the ways in which they are compartmentalized and discussed in terms of “traditions” of British film making, in which realism and fantasy are imaged as parallel tracks that are fundamentally at odds with one another. For example, Pirie’s defining study explicitly sets out to identify a “heritage of horror” within which to locate the horror films of the late 1950s and the 1960s; and Petley’s now classic essay on “the lost continent” of British films takes this strategy one stage further and presents the horror film as an alternative to the critically celebrated tradition of British realism that challenges, subverts and “perhaps even works to deconstruct, a critically privileged realist aesthetic” (Hutchings 13). Certainly Petley’s article has been crucial in bringing whole areas of British cinema to academic attention, and in challenging the perceived superiority of realism, but Hutchings has rightly identified severe problems with this model. First, while the “realism/fantasy dichotomy upon which this metaphor [of the lost continent] depends is a central one in much critical writing on British cinema” (Hammer 13), Hutchings stresses that working class realism and horror both shared established cinema conventions, conventions that were not exclusive to them but were central to the Classical Hollywood cinema, too. As Hutchings puts it, both “invariably come in the form of 80-120 minute fictional narratives peopled by psychologically individuated characters” (Hutchings Hammer 14). For Hutchings, then, Petley actually reproduces and reinforces the dichotomy between realism and fantasy and so obscures elements that they both shared. Second, as Hutchings points out, despite critical judgements of value, the British horror films of the late 1950s and 1960s were commercially more successful than the realist films of the period so that, rather than a “lost continent” of British cinema, they can be seen as precisely the 2 3 inverse. They may have been ignored or denigrated by critics but, for the cinema going public, these horror films were probably the most visible examples of British cinema at the time. Again, however, this is the limit of Hutchings discussion of the relationship between working class realism and horror, a relationship that this article will demonstrate was far more complex and involved than is commonly acknowledged. Rather than existing as parallel tracks, working class realism and horror were closely related to one another in numerous ways and even engaged in explicit exchanges that demonstrate the presence of shared features and concerns. For this reason, there are real dangers with the ways in which British cinema history has compartmentalized materials (even though there are certainly some benefits in doing so) and, rather parallel tracks, realism and horror have been deeply entangled with one another throughout their history. This entanglement is due to the ways in which both realism and horror work through notions of the repressed, or taboo, in which the surfaces of “reality” are presented as the product of repression. In this way, the “real” is distinguished from “the world as it appears to be” and defined as that which lies beneath or behind surface appearances; or as the processes that produce those appearances. It is for this reason that both realism and horror are so often claimed to be both shocking and disturbing: they identify the “real” with repressed (or censored) materials, the ugly truth that supposedly lies behind the sanitized surface. In fact, this relationship is made explicit by one of the most celebrated British films of the mid 1960s, Repulsion, which was not only a horror film but one that was also celebrated for its realism. For example, marketing for the film claimed that it was “a frightening film that takes the everyday world and distorts it”, but not to escape from realism and into fantasy. On the contrary, it was claimed that “no other film has shown, with such intense reality, the terrifying journey 3 4 into madness” (my emphasis), a claim that was supported by the New York Times, which not only identified Repulsion as “one of the best films of the year” but one that was not simply “a detailed and gruesome account of a crumbling mind” but a realist film that sought “penetrate and expose” the hidden and repressed forces that explain its protagonist’s murderous actions (Crowther 7). Consequently, the dichotomy between realism and fantasy is not only misleading but obscures processes that can only be understood by questioning the distinctions between them. Realism, fantasy and horror are therefore better understood as interconnected terms, and are often linked to the psychological (as in Repulsion) through a common interest in the distinction between perceptions of “reality” and the “real”. This concern with the psychological also, in part, accounts for the way in which key directors of working class realism turned to horror so quickly, a trend that did not go unobserved at the time so that, as early as 1963, it was claimed: While it would be early to proclaim that realism is dead in the new British cinema, it is noticeable that during the last year or so many of our newer directors have shown signs that they no longer find it enough. Mr. Jack Clayton has moved from Room at the Top to The Innocents. Mr. Tony Richardson from Look Back in Anger to Tom Jones, and the most notable recent recruits to the feature film [have started] by firmly throwing realism out of the window [and in his second film] Mr. John Schlesinger joins the move away from realism. (Anon, “Billy Becomes”) This comment was made in relation to Billy Liar (1963), a film that explicitly moves beyond “realism” to detail its protagonist’s fantasies; and the claim is that the “move away from realism” is due to a situation in which filmmakers “no longer find it enough”, that it was insufficient and limiting. 4 5 To understand this dissatisfaction, it is worth returning to John Hill’s analysis of working class realism, where he notes the tension between narration and description (terms similar to Lukacs’ distinction between realism and naturalism, where description simply depicts the social world while narration seeks to represent the underlying processes that structure and produce the social world). However, Hill also relates this tension to one between the subjective worlds of characters within these films and the pictorial focus on the depiction of objective environments within they are located. Hutchings even quotes Lindsay Anderson in this context, a director who is cited as a key reference point in the review quoted above, and who claimed that his own contribution to working class realism, This Sporting Life (1963), already rejected the objective depiction of environment: “I have tried to abstract the film as much as possible so as not to over- emphasize the locations and keep attention on the situation between the characters” or, as he also put it, to make a film that “is almost entirely subjective” (quoted in Hutchings “Beyond” 148). The attraction of horror was therefore specifically an attraction to its psychological aspects and particularly its concern with “abnormal” psychologies, psychologies that either a product of the delusions that arise from repression, or challenge conventional perceptions by offering alternative ways of seeing “reality”. This article will therefore explore the relationship between working class realism and horror during the late 1950s and early 1960s, a relationship which was deeply entangled; but rather than simply read this relationship off the films, the article will largely focus on an analysis of reviews published at the time, reviews that may have reproduced the dichotomy between realism and fantasy but also provide evidence of these relationships, and of how they were understood. The article will also predominantly focus on the first three films of the “‘new wave’ 5 6 of working class realism”, films that established the type and perceptions of it, and after which those associated with the form began to demonstrate a dissatisfaction with it.

Load more